Open for business: the Google Apps Marketplace
Every day, thousands of businesses choose the cloud. More than 2 million businesses have adopted Google Apps over the last three years, eliminating the hassles associated with purchasing, installing and maintaining hardware and software themselves.
Context & Ripple Effects
The launch answers the critique Business Week laid out in May 2009, when it asked what was holding back Google Apps — a suite seen as capable but thin compared with what enterprises expected from office software. Opening a marketplace turns Apps from a standalone product into a platform: third-party vendors can now sell applications that plug directly into an installed base Google puts at more than 2 million businesses over three years.
The move matters because distribution, not features, has been the bottleneck — independent software vendors had no clean way to reach Google Apps customers, and those customers had no storefront for extending the suite. Mashable picked up the launch the same day, signalling how closely the developer ecosystem was watching.
First-order effects
- Third-party developers get a direct sales channel into Google's claimed base of more than 2 million business Apps customers, with installation handled inside the suite rather than through traditional IT procurement.
- Businesses on Google Apps can extend their deployments immediately — adding integrated third-party tools without buying servers or managing separate installations.
Second-order effects
- ISVs weighing where to invest now face a platform decision: building for the Apps Marketplace competes for engineering resources against integrations for incumbent desktop-office ecosystems, pressuring Microsoft's partner network to justify itself.
- Cloud-suite rivals are pushed toward the same storefront model, because a vendor-controlled marketplace becomes a switching cost — once a customer's line-of-business tools live inside Apps, migration means rebuilding those integrations.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, enterprise application distribution consolidates around suite owners: the company controlling the productivity platform also controls which business software reaches the customer, replicating consumer app-store economics inside the enterprise.
- Procurement shifts accordingly — from per-seat licenses negotiated with each vendor toward subscriptions billed through a single platform gatekeeper, changing who holds pricing power in business software.
The trend: Enterprise software is reorganizing around cloud platforms with vendor-controlled marketplaces, where the owner of the productivity suite also owns the channel to the customer.